Wherein I Admit to Being a Stargate Geek

In the fifth season of Stargate SG-1 there is an episode called "Ascension" in which Air Force Major Samantha Carter is told to take a little time off.  A workaholic, Carter protests that she wouldn't know what to do with herself at home.  But the General in charge of the Stargate facility doesn't relent.  

That evening, at home, Carter's doorbell rings and she answers it to find two of her team members on her doorstep.  One is her immediate superior, Air Force Colonel Jack O'Neill (played by "MacGyver" - Richard Dean Anderson).  The other is Teal'c.

Re-Reading A Whistling Woman

"And that," said Agatha to the assembled listeners, "is the end of the story."
There was an appalled silence.
Leo said, "The end?"
"The end," said Agatha.

AS Byatt's novel, A Whistling Woman, picks up where her novel Babel Tower left off. Frederica Potter, now in legal possession of her son Leo after a bitter divorce trial, is still renting a garden flat from government bureaucrat and single mother Agatha. As the novel opens Agatha is still (still!) spinning the fantasy tale begun in Babel Tower for Leo and her daughter Saskia . But the audience for her weekly story session has expanded to include the two children from across the street as well as Frederica, Frederica's new lover John Ottokar, John's twin brother and Frederica's brother-in-law.

The opening chapter of A Whistling Woman is the final chapter of Agatha's fantasy tale and the adults are as appalled as the children at the way the story abruptly ends. As Byatt says: All these people were both shocked and affronted by Agatha's brutal exercise of narrative power." But Agatha is adamant that it is the end of the story. "That is where I always meant it to end, " she said.

This is, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the end of A Whistling Woman, the fourth and, apparently, the last in the quartet of "Frederica" novels written by Byatt. And just as Leo complains to Agatha, "That isn't an end. We don't know everything," we the Byatt readers don't know everything at the end of A Whistling Woman. But maybe that's ok because, as Frederica remarks, "What's a real end? ... The end is always the most unreal bit ..."

A Year of Blank Pages to Fill

My first blog post was one year ago today, October 12, 2008. It doesn't seem like that much time could possibly have gone by, but it has.

I started this blog as an experiment just to see how it would go. I never intended that this would be a blog mostly about what I was reading but ... that was where things went.

At the beginning I assumed I would blog about things that I liked to think about and that interested me. But I found that a lot of what I spent time thinking about fell into categories that I had prohibited myself from blogging about: law and politics. I still think a lot about law but these days I spend much, much less time thinking about politics and I find myself resenting the time that I do spend thinking about it. So at least that part isn't a temptation anymore. The law part remains a problem.